Eddie Vaughn has guided Grand Isle's basketball team to success

Brett Duke/The Times-Picayune
Grand Isle has 19 boys, and eight of them are on the basketball team.

The road Eddie Vaughn traveled to get to an aged, wood-framed gym that has held more water than important wins is a long one.

First, you go to the end of the earth and take a left.

Go past the nutria smashed in the road. Past the bayou. Past the marsh as flat as the Mississippi Delta. Past the shipyards. Past the truck swimming in the water alongside the road. Past signs advertising push poles for sale. Past the bridge that is a stent to the heart of the island that is called Grand. Go that far and you find you've arrived at isolation decorated with sand.

Isolation? Where Eddie Vaughn finds himself today is coaching a boys basketball team that is more than two hours from the nearest district opponent's gym, as many as three hours to some.

Isolation? His team had no home games in December, part of a 40-game schedule that has nine home games and will have his team traveling more than 7,000 miles. Homework is done by a book light on a bus traveling a winding road with water on either side. His school has 19 boys, eight of whom play basketball.

This is a man who has coached in the Southeastern Conference, a man whose career is decorated with district championships. This is a man who was asked by Brandon Bass, then of the Hornets, to teach him to shoot, but now he is teaching sixth-grade math.

But this is also a man coaching a school that has never made a trip to the Top 28. Its gym has no Sheetrock on its dressing room walls, has garbage bags taped over a public restroom urinal and has been condemned by FEMA.

It's all about his long, long road and a passion for basketball that pushes him down that path.

A LONG, WINDING ROAD

Grand Isle High School, which serves grades K-12, is a block building that looks like it has some parts older than others, because a tornado picked it apart years ago. It's two blocks off Louisiana 1, square in the middle of the seven-mile by one-mile barrier to the Gulf of Mexico that has 1,541 residents during the winter, more than 20,000 sometimes during summer.

It's also a magnet for storms. Every two years or so, hurricanes use it for a workout, and the rebuilding and cleanup begins. Katrina came calling some three years back and was kind enough to leave the gym with 7 feet of water. Hurricanes Gustav and Ike were nicer last September, leaving only 2 feet of slush, water and mud. After years of fixing floors, residents installed a gym floor that doesn't warp with water.

To this came Vaughn in August. In 30 seasons, he has been an assistant for such coaching luminaries as Billy Donovan, Tex Winter and Bob Boyd. He worked at Mississippi State, Marshall, Louisiana-Lafayette. He was the women's head coach at Mississippi State for a while. "We had five All-SEC academic players. We would win at 'Trivial Pursuit' and little else," he said.

He was head coach at a Kansas junior college. He was head coach at Walker High, where he turned a three-win team into a 20-win team in one season. He stayed there six years. He was head coach at Parkview Baptist for three years, winning district twice. Last season he was an assistant at Scotlandville Magnet.

Today, however, he can be found on Grand Isle, still teaching. On a recent morning with a stiff cold wind rolling the surf up toward Louisiana 1, he could be found working with a young girl who probably just wanted to sit in the stands. "Shoot it on top," he said in a soothing voice. "Bend your knees." She took a shot from the side and swished the ball.

"That's it. Thank you for that," he said.

It's all in the teaching. Fifty-three years old and starting over again, still teaching.

BACK TO THE BASICS

Last summer, Eddie and wife Alana decided they should start looking toward retirement. He needed seven years to retire from the public school system. Grand Isle was in need of a coach. Vaughn saw the ad and applied. He had been an assistant the season before at Scotlandville Magnet, where his son ran the point on a Class 5A team.

Grand Isle Principal Richard Augustin had three applicants. Only one, not surprisingly, had coached at the Pete Maravich Assembly Center.

The hire came so late that Vaughn spent the first week of school in Amia, Sweden, finishing a shooting camp. The kids were Google-ing his name to check him out.

"We were nervous," said Wade Scioneaux, who was on the All-District 9-C team last season as a sophomore after averaging 28 points. "We had heard he had coached at a couple colleges, but we were excited, too. I never thought someone would come down to Grand Isle in the middle of nowhere and coach us."

He started the second Monday of school. He and his son, Robert, moved to a caretaker's house owned by Jefferson Parish behind the school.

The team couldn't get together for a practice because no one had had a physical. There are no doctors on the island, and the cheerleader sponsor had scheduled physicals for the basketball teams for the third week of school.

He was a basketball coach without a team. So he watched two weeks of pickup games. What he saw, stunned him. "They were playing a 2-3 zone in a pickup game. You don't do that unless you're over 40. They told me that they had been told if they did that they wouldn't get tired and they could play more games. I told them they needed to get tired."

Finally, physicals taken, conditioning began.

"We went out to the beach, ran down to the fire station, 2.2 miles," Vaughn said. "We got a stretching program installed and ran back to the school. The next day we had voluntary evacuation. Friday we were gone, for what turned out to be three weeks. We missed conditioning and the first 12 days of legal practice."

When they came back, the team helped get the water out of the gym, and practice began without lights or air conditioning.

"We opened the doors and let the light in, and we practiced until it got so dark that a kid would get hit in the face by a ball," Vaughn said. "Then we moved outside and practiced on the cement. We had two good all-surface balls that my son had that we wore out."

Two weeks after electricity returned, the team played a jamboree game in Slidell.

GETTING BETTER

From the beginning, Vaughn talked to his team about expectations. "Last year they were 13-13, and even Mr. A talked about how happy they were with that," Vaughn said.

When he got back from the evacuation, he asked for a copy of the schedule.

"They said, 'We don't have one.' So I immediately began working on a schedule. We ran an ad that said, 'If you committed to play us, contact us.' I had us going to Orlando to Disney for a tournament, and Riverside called and said we had committed to play here. So we lost a trip. I spent the hurricane on the phone. You know how hard that was?"

Last season the Trojans lost games by 30-plus points several times. They finished 2-4 in district. They were beaten by Reserve Christian, the top Class C program in the state, 128-66. Runnels beat them 112-75.

"I didn't know a lot about the area, the team," Vaughn said. "I knew they had never been to the Top 28. But at the same time, you understand, there are reasons. You don't have enough numbers."

Last season the team stayed around the 3-point arc and took shots, with Scioneaux taking the most. This season, with Vaughn's son at the point, the team spreads the wealth, runs plays, works the ball. Scioneaux is one of four double-figure scorers, averaging 15 points.

By the time the Trojans reached their first game, people could tell something was different. The Runnels team that was 37 points better last season was beaten by Grand Isle in the first game by 24.

"Normally, there's a lot of enthusiasm at the beginning," Augustin said. "The first game is normally fairly well-attended, but then, other than homecoming, it begins to slack off. But these games have been attended well ever since."

The team has won 26 games (and lost 12), which Vaughn thinks might be a school record, and is ranked in the top 10 in the state. But what he wants most is a trip to the state tournament.

That would be a Grand notion.

Billy Turner can be reached at bturner@timespicayune.com or 985.645.2847.